The powerful, painful history of the Black Church has much to teach us as our culture continues to push the church to the margins of society.
By Charles Dates, The Exchange.
At dinner the other night, our family sat in earshot of a group of people discussing presidential politics. They were older, Caucasian, and rather conservative in their political leanings. It was clear that they, like many Americans, are uninspired and—in their words—disheartened by the current party presumptive nominees for this year’s election. Their reflections echoed aged sentiments of prestige, shared beliefs, and religious privilege once represented by the Oval Office.
I mentioned to my wife how nice it must have been for generations past, and cultures unlike ours, to enjoy a political system concerned about their values and attentive to their voices. Our forefathers experienced a rather different portrait of American presidents and politics, one that left them living not in the center, but on the margins of American culture.
This is no bitter slight to American history so much as it is an acknowledgement of the new disequilibrium so many American Evangelicals are feeling in the wake of a cultural shift.
More accurately, it is like an earthquake; the changing political and cultural landscapes of our nation are peaking to new levels on the American Evangelical Richter scale. A few weeks ago I had the privilege of preaching at the National Conference on Preaching in Washington, D.C. The theme of the conference was “Preaching and the Public Square.” One could sense the palpable concern that the American Evangelical pulpit is drifting closer to the margins of societal sway. It is losing political influence and moral capital.
The days of the supposed moral majority are well behind us, and the reality of the mushy middle is clearly upon us. We are learning that America is not that bastion of Christendom we once alleged. Our politics betray us, our values surprise us, and our new cultural norms indict us. In this I see no concern for despair. These may be the Church’s finest days.
My proposition is simple: Evangelical churches in America can benefit from the testimony of other Christians who have long lived on the cultural margins, from a people group who wielded no political influence or economic superiority—a people who functioned largely as a subset, or minority in the larger American Evangelical story. In their history abides a witness; a recipe for thriving ministry, and an illustration of the gospel’s power to make buoyant a church relegated to the periphery of national significance.
My claim is that the gospel of Jesus Christ enables us to live in the world, to prosper therein without being loved by the world.
1 Comment. Leave new
When the Black church looked to a paradigm to sustain it in the antebellum and Jim Crow periods it look to the Pauline letters to the persecuted community as to how it navigated life in the Roman Empire. When the early Church looked for a paradigm of how to navigate life with Rome it looked back to that of Israel under occupation, exile, enslavement. When Israel and the remnant looked as to how to rebuild the Temple after exile, it looked to the Torah and the laws of God. The PCUSA gets its clues from the NY Times and whatever is posted on Huffington any given day.
What American Protestantism either forgot or ignored was that nowhere in Holy Scripture does God ever promise or say that the community of faith, the church, the Way, call it what you will, would ever make up a critical mass to constitute the majority of any culture or society. Paul preached to the Romans and the Greeks. but never assumed Nero or Claudius would bow down to the Cross, repent, or that the Church would supplant Hellenistic culture, or overthrow the Empire. His Kingdom, as well as the response of Christ to Pilot, tells that the Church gets into trouble the moment it assumes the power structures and dynamics of the Kings and Empires. The Reformation did not happen by accident.
It is not the Faith, the Kingdom of God that is in eclipse, it is not the Church globally in systemic collapse. By all means the Church, the faith, those who confess Jesus Christ is growing by leaps and bounds where it is suppressed the most, China, Iran, Cuba, N. Korea to name a few. Even in ISIS controlled territory the Church is alive. What is in systemic collapse and eventual extinction is liberal, white European mainline Protestantism in the developed West. They sold their theological soul for the equivalent of a cheap and easy grace of acceptance by the cultural elites and academics. One should not mourn them anymore than one should mourn the extinct sects such as the Shakers. Nice folks, but they sort of lost their way. Much like the PCUSA and its progressive cousins.